Life on the Pine Ridge Native American Reservation Where Life Expectancy Is the Second-Lowest in the Western Hemisphere and 80 Percent of People Are Unemployed
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Life on the Pine Ridge Native American reservation Where life expectancy is the second-lowest in the western hemisphere and 80 percent of people are unemployed. The Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which encompasses more than 2.8 million acres, was established in 1889. By Patrick Strickland @P_Strickland_ 1 FAST FACTS • More than 5.1 million people in the US identify as fully or partially Native American or Alaska Native • More than half do not live on reservations • In 2014, more than 52 percent of the residents of Oglala Lakota lived below the poverty line Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, United States - Donald Morrison's one-room home, hidden behind a row of trees, can only be reached via a half-kilometre dirt path. He lives on his family's ancestral land. His uncle's and brother's trailer homes are nearby. Donald's yard is dotted with rusting automobiles - decaying and half-dismembered, excavated for car parts. A few metres from the wooden steps leading to his front door sits the decrepit structure - made from a pop-up trailer, scrap wood and tarps - that he lived in for two decades before the local charity Families Working Together built him a tiny home in 2011. Watch: The Fight for Native Families Donald, 60, has lived on his family's land his whole life. Time passes slowly in his corner of the Pine Ridge Reservation, and at no point in his six decades have local authorities connected his family's miniature community of shacks and trailers to the reservation's electricity grid or provided them with running water. They use car batteries and generators for a few hours of electricity a day, and Donald heats up a five- gallon bucket of water on a wood stove to bathe and wash his clothes a few times a week. The Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which encompasses more than 2.8 million acres, was established in 1889 as Camp 334 for indigenous prisoners of war as white colonists pressed westward across the North American continent. It is home to the Oglala Lakota, a tribe that is part of the Sioux people. Much like Native American reservations across the United States, the 38,000-person indigenous community is disconnected from the state's economic lifelines and untouched by development. Among the most impoverished of these reservations, Pine Ridge is plagued by an 80 to 90 percent unemployment rate with a median individual income of $4,000 a year, according to the Re-Member nonprofit organisation's 2007 statistics. The US Census Bureau's 2014 study found that more than 52 percent of residents in Oglala Lakota, the largest of Pine Ridge's three counties, lived below the poverty line. Against this backdrop of poverty and joblessness, public health has suffered, according to Re-Member. More than 80 percent of residents suffer from alcoholism. A quarter of children are born with foetal alcohol syndrome or similar conditions. Life expectancy - 48 years for men, 52 for women - is the second-lowest in the western hemisphere, behind only the Caribbean country Haiti. OPINION: Native Lives Matter goes beyond police brutality 2 The tuberculosis and diabetes rates are eight times the national averages, while the cervical cancer rate is five times more than the US average. On a bright but chilly afternoon in late October, Donald walks through his yard, past the outhouse, around the old rusting sedan his dog is chained to, and arrives at the bundle of firewood he chopped earlier in the week. He moves some inside his home and emerges after a few moments. A bundle of wires connects the battery of his Ford pickup truck to a rumbling generator on his porch. This source of electricity allows him to watch a few hours of television each night before bed. Donald and his siblings never attended school. And while he understands a good amount of English, he never learned to fluently speak any language other than his mother tongue, Lakota. Although Channels Five, Nine and Twelve broadcasted the highly publicised presidential debates between Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and her Republican counterpart Donald Trump, Donald explains that he was only able to watch the highlights on the news. "It doesn't really make a difference to us here," he says of the forthcoming elections. With neither Trump nor Clinton speaking to their specific needs, many Pine Ridge residents say they have been forgotten by mainstream society, abandoned by politicians and neglected by state institutions. After years of pleading with the local tribal government - which administers the reservation on a semi- autonomous basis - and county authorities for running water and electricity, Donald resigned himself to spending his remaining years without either. "I eventually gave up," he recalls. "They just say they can't help me. It's a waste of time." Donald and his 67-year-old brother Roland, who lives in a trailer home a five-minute walk over the subtle hills that bisect their family's land, survive the first two weeks of each month on food stamps. During the second half of each month, they get by on canned meat and ramen noodles donated by charities and locals. When the donations aren't enough and they have enough gas money between them to make the 48-kilometre drive to the nearest town, they get boxes of scrap meat from a meat processing facility. Roland left the reservation for the first time in his life in April, when he was airlifted to a hospital in Rapid City for an emergency surgery after he slipped in the snow and shattered his hip while chopping firewood. Only able to move with the help of a walker, Roland, who wears a dirt-covered jacket and repeatedly pulls up his oversized jeans as they sag from his waist, says he will never be able to pay the $2,000 in medical bills through the small amounts of cash he gets doing odd jobs for neighbours and ranchers. "I can't work until the spring now," he says. Roland went to a voter registration booth in town last month to get free coffee, but the brothers say neither of them intend to vote on November 8. The office of John Yellowbird Steele, the president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe authorities in Pine Ridge, did not return Al Jazeera's numerous calls for a comment on this article. The tribal government exercises jurisdiction over crimes committed by tribal members and other indigenous people on the reservation. Over the years, however, federal authorities have reduced tribal sovereignty on Native American reservations through various pieces of legislation. 3 Time passes slowly in Pine Ridge Reservation and local authorities have not connected with the communities living there [Patrick Strickland/Al Jazeera] 'Intense conditions of colonialism' More than 5.1 million people in the US identify as fully or partially Native American or Alaska Native, according to the US Census Bureau. Up to 2.5 million identify as fully indigenous Native American or Alaska Native. Of that total, more than half do not live on reservations. Despite widely varying conditions in indigenous communities, the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs estimates that "per capita income in Indian areas is about half that of the US average, and the poverty rate is around three times higher". Reservations, including Pine Ridge, also exercise varying degrees of semi-sovereignty under the US federal government. Nick Estes, a University of New Mexico PhD candidate whose research focuses on indigenous history and decolonisation, argues that the persistent problems stemming from Pine Ridge's intergenerational poverty are rooted in America's colonial history. Misunderstanding the ways in which Native bodies are made poor and [are] criminalised makes it impossible to understand the structure of settler colonialism as a precondition for that poverty Nick Estes, a University of New Mexico PhD Clinton, Trump and the rest of the American political establishment are incapable of providing lasting solutions for the Lakota of Pine Ridge or the rest of the 566 federally recognised tribal entities in the US, he says. 4 The present-day poverty gripping many indigenous communities - on and off reservations - is firmly rooted in the historical laundry list of massacres, ethnic cleansing, land theft and broken treaties endured by indigenous people in North America, says Estes. "The fact is that Natives are poor not because they failed at civilisation. Before colonisers came we were not considered poor. We had plenty," he argues. On December 29, 1890, the US army carried out one of the bloodiest massacres inflicted on indigenous people in North America at Wounded Knee, where soldiers killed between 150 and 300 Lakota led by Chief Spotted Elk (also known as Chief Big Foot) for defying the reservation borders imposed on them by American authorities. Civilians were subsequently hired to dump the bodies in a mass grave. More than 100,000 indigenous people were forced to attend Christian boarding schools that started with President Ulysses Grant's 1869 Peace Policy and continued throughout the late 20th Century. Separated from their families, children in these schools "experienced a devastating litany of abuses, from forced assimilation and grueling labour to widespread sexual and physical abuse", recounts a 2007 Amnesty International examination. In 1973 on Pine Ridge, around 200 members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), a civil rights organisation founded in 1968, and Oglala Lakota activists occupied Wounded Knee to protest against a political crackdown by tribal president Dick Wilson. Wilson, who had created a private militia to suppress dissidents, was backed by US law enforcement, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation.